What? Dive into buying land and building in the most challenging finan­cial market in years? Who’s the crackpot suggesting I ignore all the recession alarm bells ringing away across the country and take on a big commitment to make my dream home a realitv now?

I’ll first admit I’m a realtor and talk to other realtors all the time. We’re optimists, but we also look at this market with per­spective. I’ve seen prices in some of the most beautiful parts of California drop lower than they’ve been in 10 years. Log prices have stabilized; producers are offer­ing free upgrades and other incentives to help you build your dream affordably; builders arc not only available, they’re also willing to offer deals and incentives; lenders are still offering 90% financing and rates are still at historic lows.

“The best time to invest in a vacation home is any time you can do it” says Ste­phen M. Pollan, attorney and author of Live Rich and How to Fire Your Boss. “Today’s depressed market offers a multitude of opportunities. If you’re in a good financial spot to start building, take advantage of the situation. Investing in a vacation home is the best investment I ever made — it’s a quality of life’ investment. If todays real estate market means you’ll be able to spend more precious days with your family in a place you love, go for it.”

Boston Magazine journalist and Cape Cod vacation home hunter Kris Fries-wick concurs. “Statistics, market trends, and reality on the ground make buying a Cape vacation home a no-brainer invest­ment,” she says. “Cape buyers today aren’t flippers, investors, or speculators. Today’s house hunters arc buying because they love the Cape, not because they want to make a quick buck. They’ll make money eventually when things turn around, but this market offers something far more precious: a chance to fulfill a dream that had previously been far from reach. You can’t watch the sunset from the deck of your mutual fund.”

Well, OK — but what about your situ­ation? Here’s how to evaluate how the points to see how they fit.

1. You’re ready and willing. Any realtor will tell you the most important attribute of a buyer is being emotionally ready and willing to tackle the project. Make sure everybody’s on board, and vou’re serious about building. If it’s a go, now is an ideal time for shopping for log package deals.

“We’ve had record sales this year,” says Golden Eagle Log Homes’ Tod Parmctcr, who with his brother Jay has built their parents’ passion for carefully crafted log homes into a thriving business. “Most of our customers are upscale and they want uniqueness. They know the sun is going to rise again tomorrow. This is an excel­lent time to buy because you’re able to put your home together at today’s costs, and you know when this is over, housing costs are going to go up. We have com­plete packages and I think people are buying from us because we do ‘lock in* a price that will mean they have exactly what they want a year down the road.”

“We’re seeing active buyers in the two ends of the market,” says Rich Horn, past president of the Log Homes Council and sales director of Northeastern Log Homes. “The upper end has held well, and they’re wanting more and more leisure interior features. We’re helping people make good use of their base­ments. They need space for their snow equipment, golfing clubs, hiking gear. They need a mud room where they can shower and to change before they hit the main part of the house.

“At the other end, we’ve got first time home buyers thrilled they’re going to be able to telecommute to their job from their dream location while enjoying all the ecology features they want. They want a smaller format, 1,200 to 1,400 square feet. We’re able to produce the materials package for these wonderful homes for between S30,000 and $50,000.”

One caveat about today’s real estate mar­ket: Don’t latch on to an endless search for the absolute best rock-bottom deal. Know your market, and know what is a good price for your property. Don’t hold out for too many concessions. “Five years from now, you’re not going to relish the extra $2,000 saved nearly as much as the perfect view across the river where every spring you get to watch deer wading downstream in your backyard,” Frieswick says.

2. You’re able. Be sure your finances are in good shape and your sources of income stable. “There are no more ‘No-Doc’ loans, so you’ll need to put together a folder with several months, bank, and stock state­ments, your pay stubs, and/or two years of tax returns,” says M&T Bank VP of System Built Home Fending Mike Cole, one of the lenders who has continued to offer con­struction and permanent financing. “We’re still willing to go 90% loan to appraised value, and we still have our nationwide net­ work of log home knowledgeable apprais­ers and project inspectors.”

3. Your lender is able. There’s no doubt the housing market is eager to get in gear again. Perform due diligence and inter­view a number of lenders to be certain what you can afford at today’s rates, both locally and nationally.

Strauss and a tailor from Nevada, David Jacobs, must have had the feeling that they’d struck gold with their blue jeans. They took out a patent for putting the rivets in the jeans to make them stron­ger, and received it on May 20, 1873–considered the official birthday of blue jeans. Strauss ended up being the one with the gold mine, as well as be­coming a part of American culture and decade’s worth of clothes closets.

Takeaway the league MVP, the five All-Star appearances, the Rookie of the Year award, the high school national championship, the Sports Illustrated cover at 17, and even­tually you get to a core. His mom’s in there somewhere, sure—anyone who’d buy her son a $50,000 Hummer for his 18th birthday should be. But most of it’s made up of the small group of friends he grew up with. The guys he played with from middle school through high school back in Akron, Ohio, who dubbed themselves the Fab Five and rarely lost a game together, and who watched—and supported—him as he left them in the realm of mere localphenomery to be a world­wide star. It’s those guys—and the friendship they formed—who are the focus of the new documentary, More Than a Game (out October2). The almost two hours of home movies,gamefootage, and present-day interviews show five boys become friends, a team, and, eventually, men. Which is nowhere near as painfully earnest as it sounds. We talked to him about the film.

-PM: Did it affect you, having a di­rector at school filming all the time? lebron james: It didn’t bother us at all as players. We just looked at him as part of the team, the guy carryingthe cam­era. We just lived our lives. He never made us sit down for interviews, noth-inglike that. So itwasn’tabigthing. DD: Have a favorite part? lj: When Dru [Joyce] made seven threes in the state championship our freshman year. Just to see what he went through, with all the size, and no one’s giving him a chance, and then he deliv­ered the last game of our freshman year like that. That was unbelievable. DD: Are you all still close? lj:Two of them are out here with me right now in L. A., filming a State Farm commercial. And we all live in Ohio in the off-season. Romeo Travis and Dru Joyce are playing professional basketball in Germany. Willie McGee is applying to grad school at the Uni­versity of Akron, and Sian Cotton is playing football at Walsh College in Canton, Ohio.

DD: Do you still refer to yourselves as the Fab Five?

lj: We refer to each other as friends. DD: Any jealousy issues when the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy guys started using the same name? lj: No, no, course not, man.

DD: So you’re an executive producer on the movie. Plan on doingmore producing in the future? lj: I don’t know. If a great opportunity opens itself up, I would love to be involved… or star in a movie. I’m a pretty funny guy, and I would love to do a com­edy with a bunch of funny guys—movie-star guys, where they could help me through it. DD: Has anybody approached you yet? lj: We’re just in preliminary talks with everyone. DD: What are you up to next? Lfel’tn traveling to Asia and Europe for the movie. DD: Do you remember any of the Mandarin you learned for the Olympics?

lj: Yeah, ni hao. [Hello.] That’s the only one I need.

DD:Any favorite cities over there?

lj:I like Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo—

DD: How do they compare to Akron?

lj: No place is better than Akron.

DD: Fair enough.

lj: No place.

Because I’m a dork, I’ve made a habit of reading the quarterly reports of hedge-fund managers whose thinking I admire. After all, these guys have bil­lions on the line and can afford to conduct origi­nal research far more creative and wide-ranging than even that of a giant financial-services com­pany, which must stick to narrowly defined sectors and compa­ny sizes within those sectors.

One report that’s caught my eye is that of Common Wealth Op­portunity Capital, the embryonic hedge fund run by two partners in Los Angeles and Miami. It took some very special konigees to start a hedge fund in November 2008. Not only do they confirm my worldview—that the triplingof debt during the first six months of the Obama presidency has basically sentenced America to a gen­eration of struggle and wealth depletion—but they also make a clear case for what they’re doing with that information. The fund is up 24 percent in 2009. All the more impressive because it relies so heavily on risk-offsetting trades and hedges.

A recent shareholder report had a chart that felt like a noose around my throat—debt outstanding relative to GDP. This kind of debt will inevitably devalue the dollar used to repay it, and that would typically point to gold and other hard assets. But Reagan Silber and Adam Fisher, the fund’s partners, made a compelling argument for something else: oil. Hav­ing heard the case for “peak oil”—the idea that the earth has used more than half the oil it’s ever going to find—ba­sically all my life, I was skeptical. Gas was about a buck-fifty when I got my license 24 years ago, and it’s not much more than that today. No matter how much we burn, there always seems to be more cheap oil available.

But when I called to demand an explanation, they con­verted me. “Every ounce of gold ever mined is still here,” Silber observed. “Every single barrel of oil ever drilled is gone.” Silber knocked down my objections with one of the better quotes ever squeezed out of a money manag­er: “If you are longoil, you are short ingenuity.” In other words, you don’t believe man will find an acceptable sub­stitute in time.

The Commonwealth report artfully explains why it will be so difficult to replace oil as an efficient, easily transportable deliverer of energy. The key argument is not that we’re running out of oil; it’s that we’re running out of cheap oil. It points out that the Saudis still get half their ten million barrels a day from the Ghawar field, which was discovered more than 60 years ago. No readily accessible Saudi field that produces even one million bar­rels a day has been discovered in more than 30 years.

What’s happening is that the production lost from cheap, easily drilled fields isbeingreplaced by oil that’s a lot more expensive to exploit. The Russians used slave labor to take millions of barrels out of easily accessible fields during the communist era; now they’re paying workers to dig in Siberia. Even the best oil find of the past de­cade— the Santos Basin of Brazil, notably the Tupi field, with five to eight billion barrels—takes a journey through about 18,000 feet of water, rock, and salt. Extraction costs are estimated at $75 a barrel. I’m a believer.

Of course, even if you accept the premise, the real art is express­ing it financially. One of the main ways Commonwealth docs it-selling credit-default swaps on Abu Dhabi—isn’t appropriate for individual investors. But there are many ways to bet on oil’s con­tinued sad dominance and the utter failure of all alternatives to deliver calories as densely or any more cheaply.

She smiles at him seductively and says, “I am.”

He says, “Well, wash your friggin’ hands. I want a cheese sandwich.”

ABOUT THE JOKESTER:

Before Alison Brie was cast as ad executive Pete Campbell’s but-toned-up, neglected wife, Trudy, on Mad Men, the South Pasadena, California, native worked as a clown at children’s birthday par­ties: “I’d drive down to the office in Compton in a clown suit and pick up a bag of balloons and a boom box.” While she was proud of be­ing the least likely balloon-animal maker in L. A. County, Brie was focused on a slightly more high­brow form of live entertainment: the theater. She was appearing in a local production of Hamlet when she got the call from Mad Men. In addition to her role on that show, Brie plays Annie, one of the stu­dents on NBC’s new comedy Com­munity, which also stars Chevy Chase and Joel McHale. Which means it doesn’t look like she’ll be returning to the small stage—or the backyard-anytime soon.

The consensus of all the squawk-ers on business radio and cable TV and all over the Internet is that the economy is going to segue into a long, slow, uninspiringrecovery that won’t feel much different from the grim recession we’ve been suffer-ingthrough. As usual, we at Esquire think the conventional wisdom must be completely off base: Either a) the effects of crisis in credit-card debt and the commercial real estate mar­ket are going to conspire to throw our economy back into recession, or b) this period of uptick is going to turn into something inspiring.

We vote for b. But either way, in candor, we think this is the right mo­ment for the Feel Good Issue. It’s not (just) about virtue or healthful be­havior (hell, I’m eating Cheez-Its and drinking a Stella while writing this); no, it’s more about stimulating a certain degree of happiness. We hope the experience of reading this issue will actually make you (and us) feel better.

There arc plenty of challenges. We live in a culture that has begun to prize the appearance of accomplish­ment over actual accomplishment-it continues to amaze me that pri­vate enterprise and venture capital spend so much time and energy (not to mention cash) on “innovations” like Twitter and other forms of so­cial blathering rather than on mar­shaling the energies and talents of our engineers to create new indus­tries to replace the ones that enabled the American Century.

But, hey, there are always reasons to feel bad. This is the Feel Good Is­sue. We’ve got good news (page 176). We’ve got pure enjoyment (pages 128,140,150). We name the best peo­ple in the world—based on our ad­mittedly narrow criteria (page 127). We’ve even got a blockbuster piece of investigative journalism on the man who emerged a winner from the dec-imation of our economic system in September 2008.

I feel better already.